Inside Trump's White House

by Doug Wead

  Ivanka and Jared both traveled to Jerusalem and delivered speeches for the dedication of the new embassy. The event had a profound significance on Jared Kushner, who was accompanied by his older sister, Dara.

  “For Ivanka and I, a big part was my sister coming to the dedication. My older sister came by the hotel beforehand to see me and rode over with me. It was a thrill to be able to think about the fact that we were grandchildren of Holocaust survivors,” Jared said. “The Nazis had tried to kill the entire Jewish people and kill our family. A lot of our family died. And now here we were, together, in Israel, in a Jewish state, on the day where we were dedicating the new American embassy in Jerusalem. We were representing the president of the United States, and we were there with the secretary of the treasury, and with the prime minister of Israel. That was a very, very, very, significant moment in our lives.

  “I was able to make a speech. I don’t speak publicly very often, but this was a real honor to be able to be there presenting and trying to give a message of hope and unity. A message about how it is important for the world to recognize truth and reality. That we’re only going to move forward if we start acknowledging the truth.”

  It was a historic moment, I said. The dedication of the new embassy.

  “It was something that should have been done a long time ago,” Kushner replied.

  During the trip to Jerusalem, Jared and Ivanka Kushner stayed at the famous five-star King David Hotel. I had my own fond memories of stays there. I also have an autographed photo of Menachem Begin, the deceased former prime minister of Israel, who as a member of the Jewish resistance had ordered the bombing of the hotel that had left ninety-one people dead. The Middle East is a complicated business.

  “The day of the ceremony, Ivanka and I had lunch in the dining room of the King David,” Jared said. “We were joined by Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Dean Heller, Senator Mike Lee, and Senator Ted Cruz. It was a great lunch with a bunch of senators, and there were all kinds of people who were so excited to be there. So many of them have now become good friends.”

  The event’s organizers had blocked off the room and arranged one of those famous Israeli luncheons. There was a spread of grilled chicken, falafel, olives, pita, hummus, and all the good things that make dining in Israel a memorable experience.

  “There were a lot of laughs, and people were really just very, very excited about what was about to happen,” Kushner said. “They were appreciating and understanding the historical significance of this day that had been long overdue. People understood the political courage that the president had shown, in not only keeping his promise, but in going forward and wanting to recognize right from wrong. The president was really fighting for progress and trying to make sure that he was doing his part to move the world forward.”

  Our evening had gone on way too long. The fire, once ablaze, now smoldering embers. The children had made an early appearance in their pajamas, and Ivanka had retreated for a time to put them to bed. When Myriam and I finally said good night to Jared and Ivanka that cold Sunday evening in January, we thanked them both for the work they were doing.

  Ivanka was kind and radiant. One again, Jared Kushner was self-effacing. “Well, we are privileged to serve our country,” he said.

  NOTES

  1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Jared Kushner in this chapter come from conversations or interviews in 2019.

  2. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a9168995/ivanka-trump-west-wing-office/

  3. Vicky Ward, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump (New York: St. Martin Press, 2019) Also cited in this New York Times story: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/us/politics/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-book.html

  4. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/us/politics/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-book.html

  5. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/us/politics/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-book.html

  6. https://cei.org/blog/obama-claims-paris-climate-agreement-not-treaty-huh

  7. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/most-americans-support-staying-in-the-paris-agreement/528663/

  8. https://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/06/trump_i_was_elected_to_represe.html

  9. Interview with President Trump, January 2019.

  10. https://www.businessinsider.com/paris-climate-agreement-trump-why-us

  11. https://personalliberty.com/sexist-donald-trump-empowers-women-white-house/

  12. https://nypost.com/2016/11/22/trumps-thinks-kushner-could-help-broker-peace-in-middle-east/

  13. https://www.nytimes.com/live/trump-at-the-new-york-times-the-tweets/

  14. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-does-jared-kushner-do-in-trump-administration-2017-4

  15. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-does-jared-kushner-do-in-trump-administration-2017-4

  16. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-ivanka-trump-address-congress-562664

  17. https://dailycaller.com/2017/12/06/flashback-all-the-times-past-presidents-promised-to-move-us-embassy-to-jerusalem/

  18. Interview with Jared Kushner, May 2019.

  13

  THE GREATEST JOBS PRESIDENT GOD EVER CREATED

  “The election was not a right-versus-left contest, it was the outsiders versus the insiders.”

  —JARED KUSHNER1

  In three separate conversations with the president, the red-hot American economy came up. He was fascinated by the media’s stubborn refusal to recognize what was happening. In normal times, the economy was big news, a regular feature that often led newscasts.

  New jobs numbers and unemployment figures were always announced. Entire networks had been created to meet the public’s demand for detailed economic information. At last count, fifteen business channels were available to American viewers, including Bloomberg, CNBC, Sky News Business Channel, and Fox Business Network.

  Yet the great American economic miracle, the longest-running boom in US history, was largely ignored. It was as if it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t news. Stung by the election of Donald Trump, the media was now stung again by his economic success.

  “The world is collapsing,” the president said in one of our 2019 conversations. “And yet America is booming. We alone are growing stronger. It’s amazing. Great numbers came out again today on Wall Street. They do not even talk about it. They won’t admit it. They never say anything.”2

  One study tracked television news coverage during the four months leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. It showed that 92 percent of the stories about Trump on ABC, CBS and NBC were negative and fewer than 1 percent of them dealt with the economy.3

  For the record, as I write this chapter, during the summer of 2019, the Trump administration has created six million jobs. More Americans are employed than ever before in American history. Some 400,000 new manufacturing jobs have been created. It was once thought that manufacturing in America was over. Jobless claims have dropped to the lowest levels in fifty years.

  Under Trump, Americans enjoy the lowest rates of unemployment among African American workers since the government began keeping records.4 Likewise, America is experiencing the lowest unemployment rates for Hispanics and Asians and the lowest rates of unemployment for women in half a century.5

  DONALD TRUMP’S PROMISE

  In June 2015, when Donald Trump announced his candidacy, he declared that he would be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”6 No one paid much attention. But a year later, as the campaign was heating up, and after Trump secured the nomination, his repeated claims about creating jobs began to irritate the incumbent, President Obama.

  During a 2016 town hall meeting, televised by the Public Broadcasting Service, an incredulous Obama openly mocked Trump in front of the audience. A participant had asked about Trump’s jobs claim. “When somebody says … that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that?” Obama asked. “What magic wand do you have?”7


  Obama wasn’t the only one annoyed by Trump’s displays of self-confidence. He and the world’s best economists had tried to find more jobs and there weren’t any left in the cupboard.

  When then-candidate Trump issued a proposed budget promising economic growth exceeding 3 percent, perhaps even 4 percent, it was met with near-universal derision. Economic experts across the board, both Democratic and Republican, said it couldn’t happen. Not only were American economists in agreement, the opinions were nearly unanimous in Europe and across the Pacific Rim.

  Obama’s White House Council of Economic Advisers had predicted 2.1 percent growth for 2017 and 2.3 percent growth for 2018.

  Larry Summers, who had been the treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and the director of the National Economic Council under Obama, warned Americans to “plan for the worst.”8 Summers said Trump’s plan would work “if you believe in tooth fairies.”9

  Robert Brusca, a former professor at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business and chief economist of the Food and Agricultural Office at the United Nations, was dismissive of Trump’s claims. “No, pigs do not fly,” he said.10

  Online fact-checkers ridiculed Trump and helped correct the record for researchers who might have otherwise been tempted to believe his economic forecasts. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco estimated that “real” economic growth would be closer to 1.5 percent, or maybe 1.7 percent.

  “It’s time to embrace the malaise,” declared the Financial Tribune. “The era of greatness is done.”11

  Moody’s Analytics produced an exhaustive, well-documented assessment of what would happen to the economy under Trump.12 There would be a severe recession. Unemployment would rise to 7 percent.13 One of the authors of the report was Mark Zandi, who had advised Senator John McCain during his 2008 presidential bid.

  Even four months into his presidency, after Trump’s positive talk and deregulation campaign had ignited a stock market boom and stronger economic growth seemed possible, economists across the board, Republicans and Democrats, maintained a united negative voice. They appeared to be buoyed by each other’s dark opinions and frightened to break ranks and risk facing ridicule from colleagues.

  On May 19, 2017, in an analysis for the Los Angeles Times, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Michael Hiltzik quoted experts across all partisan and ideological lines and concluded that going beyond 2 percent growth was unlikely. “Making up the difference from 2% to more than 3% looks like a pipe dream,” he wrote.14

  According to many economics experts, the US economy under the Trump administration was going nowhere. Of course, the political elites had predicted that he could never win the presidency in the first place.

  But Trump had a habit of doing what experts said couldn’t be done. For the record, by his second year in office, the economy was growing at 4.2 percent.15

  ERIC TRUMP’S EXPLANATION

  Some of Trump’s family members were equally astonished by what they saw as the media’s denial. “It’s amazing when you see what’s going on,” Eric Trump said. “Sometimes I think, ‘Well, maybe I see it because I’m a business guy, or maybe because I run a company, or maybe because I am a math guy.’ But then, why not report wage increases? Everybody feels that. At every level.

  “There is just no arguing his success. There’s no arguing the quantifiable metrics. If you actually get down to a serious conversation and you talk numbers and you talk employment, you talk wage growth and you talk consumer confidence, how can you not recognize what is happening?

  “Look where we are with these trade wars? Forbes has been tracking it with some honest articles about China being down thirty-two to thirty-three percent.”16

  I scrambled to find a Forbes article by Kenneth Rapoza entitled “China Is Losing the Trade War in Nearly Every Way.”17 I passed it to Eric.

  “Yes, this is it,” he said. “There are some others that go bullet point by bullet point, breaking down the whole process. And when you watch The View, you have a bunch of talking heads attacking my father. I mean, it’s incredible.

  “I couldn’t be prouder of him. I couldn’t be happier for the American workers who are finding jobs and seeing their wages increased. We all fought so hard to get to this moment. And he fought so damn hard to achieve this.”

  Lara Trump wasn’t surprised by the economic numbers. “I just knew before he became president that if anyone understood the way the economy works, it’s a businessman,” she said. “The guy who has dealt with money his whole life, who has made his name off of being a billionaire. He understood all the loopholes, all the things that didn’t work, and the reasons why they were hurting the country.

  “Listen, he has had ties all over the world. Forever. He’s had all kinds of things manufactured and he had to go to China to get it done because we had no manufacturing left in this country. Before Donald Trump it was not competitive to manufacture here in the United States. So I knew he was going to be incredible for the economy well before he became president.

  “Look at all the facts. Look at how he has rolled back regulations, giving small businesses so much more opportunity to hire people. My parents are small business owners. It’s impacted them. The fact that he has been calling out the unfair trade deals around the world. Finally, someone is standing up and saying, ‘Guys, this isn’t fair. We’ve got to fix this.’ And guess what? It wasn’t easy but he’s making a lot of progress. I think China’s right there, ready to make some really good deals with him. He obviously did it with Canada and Mexico. It has allowed American businesses to thrive, allowing people to get back to work.”18

  Like his father, Eric Trump often brought the subject back to the national media and their glaring omissions. Fake news was about more than reporting false information; it was about ignoring important, true information, he said.

  He singled out George Stephanopoulos, the former Democratic adviser and ABC News commentator and host. “During the campaign, Stephanopoulos was sitting in his ivory tower” in Lincoln Square, across the street from ABC News’s headquarters. “People in the media weren’t getting the movement; they weren’t getting the people that were left behind in this country. So it makes sense they didn’t see it as newsworthy when these people started to get jobs.

  “I mean, we would go to this town that had the most beautiful factory that you had ever seen other than the fact that the windows were boarded up, the parking lot had a chain-link fence around it, and there were no cars. There would be no lights on. It was a ghost town. But you could see the beauty of the building. You could see the beauty of the manufacturing and the commerce that had taken place there. This factory was dead and you still had a town surrounding the factory. It had once employed ninety percent of the people in this town, and that town was dead. Every single one of those people in that town were forgotten because of stupid deals like NAFTA. Because our politicians didn’t give a damn.

  “There was this woman in Iowa, she goes, ‘I get seven hundred dollars from Social Security. The problem is, I spend a thousand bucks every month on insulin shots.’ She has stage II diabetes. She continued, ‘So I cannot afford to eat. I can’t afford anything. I’m lucky I have a son and he has a job. He doesn’t do very well, but just enough to make up the difference and get me a little food.’ She said she was living in his living room.

  “You want to cry when you meet these people,” Eric Trump said. “These people were truly forgotten. The media doesn’t care about these people. They never do stories on them. It doesn’t fit their narrative. The media has its own agenda. And these people don’t fit. As far as they are concerned, these people don’t exist. But my father works every day for these people. We were out there and we met them and we heard them and we think about them every day. All these new jobs you hear about? He’s doing it for those forgotten men and women.”

  STEPHANIE GRISHAM’S GRAND ARRIVAL

  From the beginning of this book project, my access to the Trump White House p
assed through the offices of Bill Shine and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

  After Shine stepped down as director of White House communications in March 2019, I operated exclusively through the office of Sanders, who was serving as the White House press secretary. In the hot summer of 2019, all of that changed. Sanders resigned. She had been a highly respected staffer with a reputation for intense loyalty to the president. Her emails had opened the way for my interviews with administration staff.

  Now my hope for continuing access, my connection to finish this book, ran through the office of a new White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham. I knew Grisham by reputation from her work in Arizona politics. She was known for being fiercely loyal to whomever she worked with. Previously, she had worked as press secretary to the first lady, Melania Trump.

  Stephanie landed in her new job in spectacular fashion. On a presidential trip to Asia, she impressed the cynical, jaded White House press corps by fighting for their right to cover the president’s impromptu walk into North Korea. It was a singular moment of history. Trump was stepping across this contentious border, where guards had shot at each other and soldiers had been killed. It marked another seminal moment in the relationship between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.

  Seeing Grisham, an assertive American woman, fighting off North Korean security bullies, brought smiles and cheers from all Americans. There she was, pushing open a path for the White House press corps to ensure they could cover the story.

  It was instructive that the announcement of Grisham’s appointment had come from the first lady. Stephanie would have multiple assignments. She would do the jobs that had previously been done by both Bill Shine and Sarah Sanders, White House communications director as well as press secretary. She would also keep her old job, as press secretary to the first lady.19 The president was reconfiguring the White House staff, creating “super aides.”